THE LAVENDER KOOLADE TUTU CONNECTION
THE LAVENDER KOOLAID TUTU CONNECTION: EDGAR DEGAS MEETS THE PHANTOM
Dear Reader: I was rummaging thru books at the Upper Arlington Library Sale when I spied a used paperback of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of The Opera, one of my favorite reads .--If you read my descriptions of the dancers in the current Columbus Museum of Art exhibit* (Look farther down on this post) and if you like hit musicals, you may be interested in knowing that Edgar Degas, and the Phantom, and Leroux, the Phantom's author, were, loosely speaking, contemporaries! At least , all three of them haunted the same vast Paris Opera house --its mirrors, dressing rooms, marble corridors-- during roughly the same times. And although Leroux was the younger, his life as well as Degas' touched La Belle Epoch, the lush yet impoverished period between the Franco Prussian War, 1870,and World War I, 1914 - 1918. Both Degas and Leroux observed first hand the scampering ballet kids and the angular bare shouldered, ballerinas, the leading dancers. Indeed, Leroux,-- a gregarious, rotund, woman-chaser -seemed to know the interior of the Opera, like the linings of his own expensive suede gloves! Degas knew his way around the Opera too, but having rationalist and upper crust sensibilities, it is unlikely that he saw the Opera Ghost, and his relationships with the Opera dancers, were strictly for art's sake. --Yes, children there was a Phantom before there was an Andrew Lloyd Webber, and hence I am sharing with you some passages (!} from Leroux' novel, followed by my own descriptions of dancers in the current Art Museum exhibit. It is up to you to connect the invisible dots, and it is up to you to verify the existence of the Opera Ghost. . . From the novel:
"Suddenly, the dressing room of La Sorelli, one of the principal dancers, was invaded by half a dozen young ladies of the ballet, who had come up from the stage after dancing Polyeucte. They rushed in amid great confusion, some giving vent to forced and unnatural laughter, others to cries of terror. Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment, looked around angily at the mad and tumultuous crowd.
"It was little Jammes --the girl with the tip tilted nose, the forget me not eyes, the lily white neck and shoulder--who gave the explanation in a trembling voice:
"'It's the ghost!" and she locked the door.
"La Sorelli's dressing room was fitted up with official commonplace elegance. . . A pier glass, a sofa, a dressing table and a cupboard. On the walls a few engravings, relics of the mother who had known the glories of the old Opera in the Rue de Pelletier.
BUT THE ROOM SEEMED A PALACE TO THE BRATS OF THE CORPS DE BALLET
who were lodged in common dressing rooms where they spent their time singing, quarreling, smacking the Dressers and Hair Dressers, and buying one another glasses of cassis, beer, or even rhum, until the call boy's bell had rung."
Degas painted his large Foyer de la Danse in 1872. Leroux, younger than Degas, published first edition of The Phantom in 1911. In 1879 Scribner's magazine published this (partial) description of The Paris Opera.
" The Foyer de la Danse of the Opera is a place to which the subscribers to three performances a week are admitted between the acts in accordance with a usage established in 1870. Three immense looking-glasses cover the back wall of the Foyer, and a chandelier with one hundred and seven burners supplies it with light. The paintings include twenty oval medallions in which are portrayed the twenty danseuses of most celebrity since the Opera has existed in France... . While the ladies of the ballet receive their admirers in this Foyer, they can practice their steps ! Velvet cushioned barres have been secured at convienient points, and the floor has been given the same slope as that of the stage, so that the labor expanded may be holy profitable to the performance."
Again, children, there was a Phantom before Lloyd Webber wrote his opera and even before Lon Cheyney Jr. appeared in the 1925 Silent, its opening punctuated by a quavering bevy of --guess who--"young ladies from the ballet of The Paris Opera!"
YES, YOU'LL SEE HIS BALLERINAS!
On handbags, note cards, frig magnets, Degas ballerinas have spread like berries in a patch! They're angular pretty dancers, and everybody loves them. In his prime Degas painted dancers on stage at the Paris Opera and at work at the Opera School with its vast practice floor. He always separated the dancers from the dance, that is he always caught them in an off moment so that painting was painting: the actual choreography remained a separate art.
As a figure painter Degas painted transitions. A collapse on a bench. The caught breath in the wings. "The space between." --For example, the split second when a dancer lands from, or pushes off, into a grande jete, a leap There is one "ballerina painting" in the current exhibit, and one "ballerina sculpture."
DANCER WITH BOUQUET, 1895 to 1900.
An unseen audience applauds. Our prima ballerina, nearly life sized, stands alone on the Opera stage in this large, broadly painted canvass, 71 x 60 inches She wears a long tarleton skirt--dusk purple lanvender--which has not yet evolved into a short tutu! Mademoiselle stands up front where the stage is dark. Yet, her face is turned toward the light. Her jaw is strong, her hair pulled straight back, crowned with pink blossoms.
She's on the upswing from a reverence, a curtsey, and her right arm springs, awkwardly, lightly, up toward her face. Her left hand holds her skirt. This "candid camera" effect is a Degas hallmark.
A painted backdrop--forest, pink-streaked sky, ocean(?) with two rocks--gleams behind her. Two large bouquets --red roses in paper cones--have been tossed from the Opera "boxes "and lie close to her feet. Our ballerina--face shoulders arms, illuminated--closes her eyes at the glare from--a gaslight? an electrified spot? A painter's perogative? She's a veteran dancer, a long time "favorite." She appreciates her applauding admirers, but she is exhausted.
Degas' eyesight is diminishing with age, yet he has captured the split second off guard expression on her face. The performance is over.
( The Phantom may be watching. Connect the dots to Madame Sorelli and the little dancers crowding her dressing room, as described earlier, and to the Scribners magazine description..)
THE LITTLE DANCER AGE FOURTEEN
She's 39 inches tall and consists of bronze, tulle, and silk ribbon. Degas originally sculpted her sometime between 1879 to 81. She is the most famous little dancer in the world, and she spends a great deal of time posing n the collection of Abigail and Leslie Wexner. The Little Dancer is small for fourteen. She is likely "a rat," the slang term for the near extras, students who filled out the Corps de Ballet. (connect the dots to Little Jammes)They were often, not always, the children of the working poor. Their lives at the ballet school with its rigorous disciplines, leering hangers-on, (oh, that Foyer!) were precarious, but a way up. The 1881 art critics sawThe Little Dancer as "impudent" and "from the gutter."--Her tough but easy stance , her skinny body and finely honed face, form a timeless picture of determination. Yet, in 2006, she seems familiar, confidently middle class. She might be a young, competitive BalletMet student resting, if sassily, listening to a transistor between rehearsals for BalletMet's Nutcracker!
The satin ribbon continues to gleam. Connect the dots on the time machine screen!
Degas: The Last Landscapes, will show at the Columbus Art Museum, 480 East Broad St. thru January 21, 2007. The two ballerinas will be there, and the wonderful landscapes, and who knows, the Phantom may show up! note: Liz reviewed The Last Landscapes for the 2006 December issue of The Short North Gazette.
Dear Reader: I was rummaging thru books at the Upper Arlington Library Sale when I spied a used paperback of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of The Opera, one of my favorite reads .--If you read my descriptions of the dancers in the current Columbus Museum of Art exhibit* (Look farther down on this post) and if you like hit musicals, you may be interested in knowing that Edgar Degas, and the Phantom, and Leroux, the Phantom's author, were, loosely speaking, contemporaries! At least , all three of them haunted the same vast Paris Opera house --its mirrors, dressing rooms, marble corridors-- during roughly the same times. And although Leroux was the younger, his life as well as Degas' touched La Belle Epoch, the lush yet impoverished period between the Franco Prussian War, 1870,and World War I, 1914 - 1918. Both Degas and Leroux observed first hand the scampering ballet kids and the angular bare shouldered, ballerinas, the leading dancers. Indeed, Leroux,-- a gregarious, rotund, woman-chaser -seemed to know the interior of the Opera, like the linings of his own expensive suede gloves! Degas knew his way around the Opera too, but having rationalist and upper crust sensibilities, it is unlikely that he saw the Opera Ghost, and his relationships with the Opera dancers, were strictly for art's sake. --Yes, children there was a Phantom before there was an Andrew Lloyd Webber, and hence I am sharing with you some passages (!} from Leroux' novel, followed by my own descriptions of dancers in the current Art Museum exhibit. It is up to you to connect the invisible dots, and it is up to you to verify the existence of the Opera Ghost. . . From the novel:
"Suddenly, the dressing room of La Sorelli, one of the principal dancers, was invaded by half a dozen young ladies of the ballet, who had come up from the stage after dancing Polyeucte. They rushed in amid great confusion, some giving vent to forced and unnatural laughter, others to cries of terror. Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment, looked around angily at the mad and tumultuous crowd.
"It was little Jammes --the girl with the tip tilted nose, the forget me not eyes, the lily white neck and shoulder--who gave the explanation in a trembling voice:
"'It's the ghost!" and she locked the door.
"La Sorelli's dressing room was fitted up with official commonplace elegance. . . A pier glass, a sofa, a dressing table and a cupboard. On the walls a few engravings, relics of the mother who had known the glories of the old Opera in the Rue de Pelletier.
BUT THE ROOM SEEMED A PALACE TO THE BRATS OF THE CORPS DE BALLET
who were lodged in common dressing rooms where they spent their time singing, quarreling, smacking the Dressers and Hair Dressers, and buying one another glasses of cassis, beer, or even rhum, until the call boy's bell had rung."
Degas painted his large Foyer de la Danse in 1872. Leroux, younger than Degas, published first edition of The Phantom in 1911. In 1879 Scribner's magazine published this (partial) description of The Paris Opera.
" The Foyer de la Danse of the Opera is a place to which the subscribers to three performances a week are admitted between the acts in accordance with a usage established in 1870. Three immense looking-glasses cover the back wall of the Foyer, and a chandelier with one hundred and seven burners supplies it with light. The paintings include twenty oval medallions in which are portrayed the twenty danseuses of most celebrity since the Opera has existed in France... . While the ladies of the ballet receive their admirers in this Foyer, they can practice their steps ! Velvet cushioned barres have been secured at convienient points, and the floor has been given the same slope as that of the stage, so that the labor expanded may be holy profitable to the performance."
Again, children, there was a Phantom before Lloyd Webber wrote his opera and even before Lon Cheyney Jr. appeared in the 1925 Silent, its opening punctuated by a quavering bevy of --guess who--"young ladies from the ballet of The Paris Opera!"
YES, YOU'LL SEE HIS BALLERINAS!
On handbags, note cards, frig magnets, Degas ballerinas have spread like berries in a patch! They're angular pretty dancers, and everybody loves them. In his prime Degas painted dancers on stage at the Paris Opera and at work at the Opera School with its vast practice floor. He always separated the dancers from the dance, that is he always caught them in an off moment so that painting was painting: the actual choreography remained a separate art.
As a figure painter Degas painted transitions. A collapse on a bench. The caught breath in the wings. "The space between." --For example, the split second when a dancer lands from, or pushes off, into a grande jete, a leap There is one "ballerina painting" in the current exhibit, and one "ballerina sculpture."
DANCER WITH BOUQUET, 1895 to 1900.
An unseen audience applauds. Our prima ballerina, nearly life sized, stands alone on the Opera stage in this large, broadly painted canvass, 71 x 60 inches She wears a long tarleton skirt--dusk purple lanvender--which has not yet evolved into a short tutu! Mademoiselle stands up front where the stage is dark. Yet, her face is turned toward the light. Her jaw is strong, her hair pulled straight back, crowned with pink blossoms.
She's on the upswing from a reverence, a curtsey, and her right arm springs, awkwardly, lightly, up toward her face. Her left hand holds her skirt. This "candid camera" effect is a Degas hallmark.
A painted backdrop--forest, pink-streaked sky, ocean(?) with two rocks--gleams behind her. Two large bouquets --red roses in paper cones--have been tossed from the Opera "boxes "and lie close to her feet. Our ballerina--face shoulders arms, illuminated--closes her eyes at the glare from--a gaslight? an electrified spot? A painter's perogative? She's a veteran dancer, a long time "favorite." She appreciates her applauding admirers, but she is exhausted.
Degas' eyesight is diminishing with age, yet he has captured the split second off guard expression on her face. The performance is over.
( The Phantom may be watching. Connect the dots to Madame Sorelli and the little dancers crowding her dressing room, as described earlier, and to the Scribners magazine description..)
THE LITTLE DANCER AGE FOURTEEN
She's 39 inches tall and consists of bronze, tulle, and silk ribbon. Degas originally sculpted her sometime between 1879 to 81. She is the most famous little dancer in the world, and she spends a great deal of time posing n the collection of Abigail and Leslie Wexner. The Little Dancer is small for fourteen. She is likely "a rat," the slang term for the near extras, students who filled out the Corps de Ballet. (connect the dots to Little Jammes)They were often, not always, the children of the working poor. Their lives at the ballet school with its rigorous disciplines, leering hangers-on, (oh, that Foyer!) were precarious, but a way up. The 1881 art critics sawThe Little Dancer as "impudent" and "from the gutter."--Her tough but easy stance , her skinny body and finely honed face, form a timeless picture of determination. Yet, in 2006, she seems familiar, confidently middle class. She might be a young, competitive BalletMet student resting, if sassily, listening to a transistor between rehearsals for BalletMet's Nutcracker!
The satin ribbon continues to gleam. Connect the dots on the time machine screen!
Degas: The Last Landscapes, will show at the Columbus Art Museum, 480 East Broad St. thru January 21, 2007. The two ballerinas will be there, and the wonderful landscapes, and who knows, the Phantom may show up! note: Liz reviewed The Last Landscapes for the 2006 December issue of The Short North Gazette.
posted by Liz James at 1:48 PM
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